Carrie Snow (born July 16, 1953) is an American stand-up comedian, writer, author, and host from Merced, California.
Snow has performed at and headlined at such stand-up venues as Caroline's, The Punch Line, The Improv (various locations), The Comedy Store, and Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
In her high school yearbook peers wrote “stay as crazy as you are.”[4] Snow attributes her wacky temperament to her parents.
It was at this age and stage in her career that Snow saw an improvement in the time slots she received from owner Tony DePaul.
At a show at Caroline's in New York in 1986, Variety’s New Acts section reviews that Snow "nicely creates a warped world where buying becomes “retail grazing” and any eyeliner or lipstick is replaced by a van load of cosmetics.
In an early variation of this bit from an episode of An Evening at the Improv that originally aired on June 22, 1993, Snow began with her reactions to reading about Sylvia Plath's experience seeing a naked man for the first time in The Bell Jar.
[9] Playing off the audience's laughter, Snow launches into the next segment about watching Philip Kaufman's Rising Sun (1992) with her father.
From a 1989 show at The Improv, the Los Angeles Times' Duncan Strauss comments that “Snow is low-key and conversational.”[10] In the same article he calls her show “Pretty close to an ideal synthesis of persona, delivery and material, because while many of her topics are wholly contemporary, much of her chatty style is a throwback to the approach of earlier female comics: self-deprecating, especially about her weight and her troubled dating life.”[10] Snow often implemented a conversational style of stand-up to comment on her family, movies, food, and body image.
In the student competitors’ auditions at The Improv, participant Richard Rothenstein “sold a joke to comic Carrie Snow (“She spent so much time ego-tripping, she got frequent-flyer miles.”).
Several times during Friday's show, Snow said something fresh or funny and stopped to make a note of it in her script, which she still refers to frequently.”[16] In the 2000s once Snow returned to performing, she appeared at venues such as The Comedy & Magic Club, The Sharky's Lounge at Paradise Casino, The Ventura Harbor Comedy Club, and The Improv at Harveys in Lake Tahoe.
Themes and subjects range from body image and her relationship with food, her shopping tendencies, her family, and her sex life.
[10] Snow kept a joke book and recalls that she “Would write jokes down and move them to the back and that's how I would infiltrate new jokes.”[13] In October 2015 ahead of Snow's show at The Tahoe Improv, commenting on her comedic influences, she, “talks very highly of physical comedic legends such as Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers.
Specifically, the differences in treatment between male and female comics with booking shows, pay gaps, and comments women get on their appearances.
They pay me like $2500 in cash and I put it in my bra and go ‘man that's livin.’ And not realizing that the guys were getting twice as much.”[13] Snow's writing jobs have also related to her desire to see more opportunities open up for women comedians.
In journalist Yale Kohen's book, We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy, Snow states, “We really thought that when Roseanne got on The Tonight Show, it was going to open it up for women comics.”[19] While writing for an appearance Barr made on The Tonight Show, she hoped that this event would inspire more opportunities for female comics, and yet it did not have the effect she'd hoped for.
This period had gendered dynamics where writer and occasional comedian Merrill Markoe details that during the boom years “at the time, stand-up was really a man's world.
This hope for women comics connects with Snow's rocky history with The Comedy Store owner Mitzi Shore.
Author and literary agent Bill Adler's book Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women includes Snow's one liner: “a male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who has never owned a car.”[27] Snow is included in this collection of “words of advice for inspiration” along with comedians such as Mae West, Elayne Boosler, and Whoopi Goldberg.
She defines bawd as being “the most overtly sexual persona of the five rhetorical postures female comics in the USA have historically assumed on stage.”[28] Gilbert asserts that some of Snow's female contemporaries were “Emboldened by second wave—and ultimately, third wave—feminism, and more aggressive than their precursors, notable bawds of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s included the ‘Divine Miss M.,’ Bette Midler, La Wanda Page, Carrie Snow, Angela Scott, Adrienne Tolsch, Caroline Rhea, Stephanie Hodge, and Thea Vidale—all important voices that paved the way for contemporary comics like Silverman, Schumer, and Holly Lorka, who performs bawdy humor from a lesbian perspective.”[28]